An intervention on the response of
campus labor to the federal funding freezes

14 May 2025

We belong to an informal network of higher ed labor organizers across the U.S. with extensive strike experience. We have been meeting to strategize our response to the coordinated assault on our sector. Most of us belong to grad worker and postdoc unions, variously in UE, SEIU, UAW, and AFT; one has graduated into organizing within AAUP. We present the following for the urgent consideration of fellow academic labor organizers, and particularly for workers in R1 institutions.

Higher education in the U.S. is under direct and concerted attack. Certain aspects appear novel under the new government, such as the deportation motions and the sudden withdrawal of federal funding in the sciences, until now relatively insulated from austerity measures. Others are accelerations of existing trends: the bleeding of non-STEM disciplines, the casualization of employment, the erosion of academic freedoms, etc. The higher ed labor movement has correctly recognized the threats posed by ICE raids, the expulsion of the union president at Columbia University, and the visa revocations, in many cases organizing to issue demands of the university for various forms of protection. In response to the federal funding freezes, however, few academic labor unions have sought to wield their power at work to challenge the administrative response to funding shortfalls. 

Our movement has largely prioritized rallies at state capitols and lobbying state officials, at times even seeking common cause with university administrators. This underestimates the urgent threat posed by our employer. Certainly, no-one believes that administrators welcome the shortfall of government receipts. But we should anticipate that they will use the crisis to restructure instruction and research in their interests: reversing the impressive recent gains of organized labor by minimizing existing bargaining units, replacing academic workers with AI and adjunct positions, expanding class sizes, closing pathways to future employment, and taking advantage of their widened license to repress opposition. All such steps will not only degrade our working conditions, but hollow out our capacity to fight in the future precisely as we must be building it.

To focus only on the executive or legislature at this moment overlooks the power we have built and where it can be wielded: namely, in the workplace, to defend students and workers, to force the university to meet any and all shortfalls, and to control the response to the crisis. We must compose our fights across bargaining units and employment categories as quickly as possible. Preparation can start right now.

The response of campus unions

The major part of the organized response to the funding freezes so far has consisted of campaigns to contact elected representatives, petitioning, staging informational town halls, and rallying at government sites. Elsewhere, academic workers have developed coalition petitions calling on the university to better protect its employees, collecting hundreds of signatures. Common demands emerging from these early initiatives include: financial transparency and transparency of funding priorities, emergency funding for workers whose grants are now frozen, and guarantees of job security and research continuity. 

We consider these demands very promising, but petitions tend not to facilitate the collective deliberation of coworkers, nor prepare for the labor action necessary to win. Our experience of contract campaigns, strikes, and other fights at work suggest that demands of the administration that emerge from department-level meetings and discussion will best prepare campus workers for the fights to come. 

A few campus unions have focused their response on bottom-up organizing, although our efforts are nascent. On campuses where workers are accustomed to departmental organizing, especially after recent strikes, we have held department, lab, and area-level meetings to assess the effects of funding freezes and plan a response together (see examples and FAQs below). NOTE: We have not held meetings exclusively in disciplines that are directly affected by cuts. Those of us likely to be asked to “bear the burden” elsewhere on campus—in humanities, arts, and social sciences—are also meeting. All of us are also preparing department-level responses to the possible targeting of our international and undocumented coworkers, and some have also been organizing around austerity measures.

This needs to be replicated and coordinated on a much wider scale. Below we outline steps for starting this organizing. 

1. Form a dedicated organizing committee or working group in your department, lab, or work area with similarly oriented colleagues. Start with colleagues with whom you already have rapport or already discuss workplace issues, whether at work or in social settings.

2. Map and inquire especially among highly affected disciplines. Where has funding been frozen in your group? How much, and for what projects? Are jobs and incomes at risk? Who are the international workers in the department? What plans are in place, and what further support is needed? Broadcast examples and testimonials of the effects of the freezes and effective responses. In less directly affected disciplines, map out and discuss the downstream effects of administrative decisions in the wake of freezes. Here is an example mapping template, and a guide to the how and why of power mapping.

3. Hold small group meetings to cohere positions and demands. You will know best whether to include the whole department in initial stages, or to focus on one layer (e.g. grad researchers). Outcomes might include a department letter or other small collective action, or reaching out to the next layer of the department. You and your colleagues know your workplace best, and together you are qualified to develop the demands and actions that will make sense in your specific setting. Here is an example department/lab meeting agenda, developed at UCSC, and more on this experience from Boston University. 

4. Based on these meetings, formulate within the union a broader campaign with demands of the university administration, and make them widely known. Actions might include rallies, flyers, email signatures, agitational joint labor management meetings, etc., all pushing for explicit commitments from administrators. At the same time, begin strategic thinking and preparation for a labor action on the most urgent feasible timeline.

Our respective strikes forced our administrators to open their coffers and front the increased wages we won. The challenge of mounting a response to federal funding freezes should not overlook our employer, whom we can demand to protect and fund its employees. Most R1 universities have a substantial endowment, a pot of money collected from donors that is invested in the stock market and which the university taps into in order to plug funding shortfalls. We should think of our universities’ spending decisions as political and open to contestation and influence by the power of workers. For example, if all of UCSC’s NSF and HHS funding from 2024 were to be rescinded — comprising a total of $60M — the UC could cover this by spending just an additional 0.2% of its endowment. Even former Harvard president, Larry Summers, identifies the endowment as a path through this crisis.¹ (See here, on Columbia.) Recently, Yale University announced stop-gap funding pre-emptively; Dartmouth College, too, after a campaign by its graduate union, GOLD-UE. 

In most cases, this spending — or any other stop-gap measures aimed at protecting workers in the face of attacks on the federal level — will not happen of the university’s own accord: academic labor will have to force the issue. The details of a labor action, including a potential strike, will be different across our different contexts and are best determined by the workers involved. We must explore the possibility that these collective actions can come to span job titles to unite grads, postdocs, faculty, staff, and others. 

FAQ

1. My fellow organizers and I are finding it hard to orient our coworkers against the university, instead of just the federal administration. What are some things that could help them see the university as a primary target for our organizing?

It may help to reflect together on ways in which the university may have already shown how it takes into account the long-term interests of departments, faculty, staff, and students when reacting to situations outside of its direct control. For example, how did your university respond to the 2020-2021 COVID-19 emergency? Did you feel that your, your coworkers’, and your students’ safety were foremost in the response? If so, how did the university show – not just tell – you this, and do you feel similarly now? 

More recently, have austerity measures already been announced and/or implemented in response to the federal funding freezes? How have those affected your department? Have you felt the pain of hiring freezes, admissions pauses, layoffs, and raise freezes? Will these cuts make it harder – if not impossible – for your department to function in the future? 

2. My department/lab/group/office is well-organized, has identified a target, and has started making demands known to administrators locally. How can we spread these ideas to other workers on campus, and start applying pressure higher up in the university?

Begin with your existing connections! Do you or any of your coworkers have friends, housematers, labmates, etc., in comparable situations? Call them up and tell them what you’ve done and offer to help. Bring your example to a union meeting to share, including template emails and mapping sheets. 

Examples of workers implementing this approach in their own settings (ongoing)

1. Environmental studies postdocs at Princeton University

Teaching postdocs in an privately funded environmental studies program at Princeton University met to determine how to express concerns about reappointments to our program administrators. We are in a newly unionized unit with no strike experience and very limited departmental organizing that has never reached this program. As an organizer, I noted anxieties about funding for our positions that came up in small casual conversations, but I hesitated to call a meeting for several weeks based on a lack of active union engagement. To my pleasant surprise, 9 out of the 11 postdocs showed up to the meeting. We consolidated our requests for information on funding sources, a recommitment to three years of funding, and extensions or lectureships for postdocs in their third year. Fearing stonewalling if we were antagonistic or even assertive, we decided to send a collective email to administrators requesting a meeting where we would gently suggest these measures. Program administrators unknowingly preempted our request for a meeting by initiating a meeting themselves. Nevertheless, the genuine deliberation in our well-attended postdoc meeting generated a sense of collectivity and agency, and my coworkers have taken initiative with follow-up steps such as drafting, revising, and sending emails.

2. Astronomy meeting with grads, faculty, and staff at Boston University

Grads in the Astronomy Department at Boston University are exploring potential steps to win assurances from the University regarding federal funding freezes. While the grants we work on have been thus far spared, deleterious budget cuts to NASA for FY2026 are rumored. In February we called a department meeting to do initial fact finding, inviting supportive faculty and staff from the office in our department who manage our grants to lean on their expertise. The conversation was sober; we learned how grants are financed and disbursed, and how multiple staff would lose their jobs and our faculty would lose significant pay if our grants are axed. Grads are still meeting to prepare a letter collectively that we hope to have our faculty co-sign, demanding stop-gap funding should any grants be terminated. 

3. Culture & Politics at Georgetown University

In response to the recent abduction of our colleague by DHS, as well as widespread cancellations of student visas, federal funding cuts, and other attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech, our center had a meeting. We framed this as an opportunity to “talk about what we, as faculty, can do to support one another during this really challenging time.” The agenda was open-ended; we devoted about half of the hour to discussion of concerns, and the second half to concretizing these concerns into specific, material demands and steps we can take. Concerns ran the gamut from the very general (“student mental health”) to the very specific (“being doxxed for doing work on xyz”). We were able to successfully focus most of our attention on the needs of faculty as workers, and to distill some concrete demands from the general feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and frustration – although demands also touch on student issues. We are now working with other programs and centers in our unit, who we hope will also host these sorts of conversations, to take demands to the Dean.

More examples to be added over time!

₁ “Believe me, a former president of Harvard, when I say that ways can be found in an emergency to deploy even parts of the endowment that have been earmarked by their donors for other uses.”